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Friday, May 16, 2003
++ The View From The 100th Window
++ Massive Attack's latest album, 100th Window, is by no means
a great album, but it's hardly a total clunker. It's particularly
effective after dark. In the daylight, its fullness feels contrived,
an excess of ambient dread and cloying overtones. But in the small
hours of moonless nights, when distance simultaneously expands and
contracts, the record or certain of its songs, anyway
has a way of pressing up close, even too close, at once comforting
and oddly stifling. Still, even when the arrangements threaten to
boil over in a soup of wailing guitars, sotto-voce moans, roiled
cymbals and those omnipresent synthesizers, it almost always contains
itself, the flame turned down at the last moment.
"Everywhen" shows off the album's strengths and weaknesses in equal
proportion. Those ringing guitar chords, asserting themselves with
all the subtlety of a teenager's petulant sighs, lean decidedly
toward the maudlin. But Horace Andy's strangely wan singing is
this really the same person who seemed to sing with a throat lined
with charcoal-rubbed rose petals on "Do You Love My Music?"
perfectly captures the agonized half-murmur, half-cry that escapes
unbidden in the hours of total solitude when time, along with the
rest of the waking world, seems to have forsaken you.
++ Most of 100th Window's songs play out along these basic
lines, and most balance, for better or for worse, producer Robert Del
Naja's split inclinations: toward hyper-attentive curiosity on the
one hand, and obliterating bathos on the other. Since it came out,
I've actually read very little about the record; it seems to have
disappeared in the shadow of its own anticipation. (Note to students
of the Stone Roses school of 11th-hour comebacks: the longer the
buildup, the more quickly a fickle press will cast you to the pulping
mill.) What I have read seems to dwell above all on the album's
moodiness ever since the dawn of trip-hop, critics seem unable
to distinguish "mood" as a kind of lifestyle accessory from any more
complicated emotion. Of course, the artists are partly to blame here.
Indeed, at its weakest, 100th Window flashes its mood as if a
sign of some deeper sensibility, unaware that the Continent has
shifted currencies in the last decade, that its coin, impressed with
the signs of an ennui that finds its peak value in an era of
unbridled prosperity, buys a lot less than it used to.
But as conservative, even passé, as 100th Window's
emotional cast might be, sonically speaking, it's very much an
ambitiously contemporary record, though not necessarily original.
When Radiohead released Kid A and Amnesiac, every
interviewer wanted to know what Thom Yorke was listening to
where'd he get those strange, glitchy textures. (In this way,
Yorke helped folks like Autechre and Kid606 sell at least a few extra
records.) Del Naja has clearly been listening to Yorke's picks, as
well as those last two Radiohead albums. The squealing organs, dub
bass and downcast mumbling of "Small Town Shot Away" come off almost
as an homage to Radiohead's "Pakt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box";
the feathered sequencing, pocked tones and shirred static suggest
that labels like Morr Music and Mille Plateaux are generously
represented in Del Naja's CD changer. (Is it any wonder, then, that
Akufen and Luomo, both artists specializing in the merger of glitch
and grandeur, were asked to remix "Special Cases" both
succeeding, in fact, where Massive Attack stumbled, leavening the
tune's turgid molasses soul with fleet rhythms and crystalline tones.)
++ What seems strange is how these tendencies have passed almost
unnoticed in most reviews of the record; critics trot out the
trip-hop canard even when it's clear that Massive Attack have chosen
newer pop models to replace the old dub blueprints. (The band's Web
site even features the periodic appearance of an animated character
looking suspiciously like Radiohead's grinning bear icon.)
Especially in the song intros, before all those swelling strings
overflow the banks and drown the surrounding fields (crops of what
might have been), 100th Window makes a strong argument
for the pop avant-garde a few steps behind Radiohead,
perhaps, but miles ahead of, say, The Matrix (the
songwriting/production team responsible for Avril Lavigne's Let
Go and the upcoming Liz Phair).
The other thing that's strange is that Massive Attack, a month or two
after the record's release, seem to have disappeared from view
from magazines, from online discussions, from nightclub conversation.
So, it seems, any artist without Eminem's ubiquitousness or the White
Stripes' buzz power must do, succumbing to the relentless churn of
new product. It's too bad, because the record, while hardly a
stunner, is worth living with for a while, even if you do wait until
after dark to throw it on. Under the cover of darkness, a flawed
companion, mirroring your own guilty sentimentalism, is better than
none at all.
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